In 2008, a man named Trevor Oswalt composed a 45-minute instrumental album, took psilocybin mushrooms, and listened to it. What happened next changed his life. He shared the album with friends. Then he shared it with wider circles. After a positive reception, Oswalt began making music intended to be played during psychedelic journeys. He started organizing ceremonies where his music is an integral part of the experience.
Seventeen years later, that original source of inspiration has blossomed into the many-petaled flower that is East Forest—the name he now uses to record. East Forest’s projects are manifold: podcasts, retreats, guided meditations, a co-created album with spiritual leader Ram Dass. A five-hour record, in 2019, explicitly designed to accompany a psilocybin journey, Music For Mushrooms – and, in 2024, a narrative feature film of the same name, exploring the transformative power of music in medicine ceremonies. His music is used in clinical trials, including Dr. Carhart-Harris’ UCSF flagship study on psychedelic-assisted therapy. East Forest now tours the country offering “ceremonial concerts.”
East Forest may be a musician. But he has increasingly become a pioneer of a particular vision. He wants to see a world in which collective inward journeying is so integrated into the culture that musicians offering space for this could sell out one of the world’s most famous arenas, the 20,000-seat Madison Square Garden. East Forest appears to be on his way toward creating this reality.
As he prepares to set off on his new tour, Lucid News spoke with East Forest about this vision and the unique frontier at which his music lives.
This interview has been edited for publication.
At a show in New York this past February, you used a phrase: “normalize inner work.” Talk about that phrase and its connection with your ceremonial concerts.
I love this Ram Dass line: “the real work is in the privacy of your own heart.” I think we know that to be true. So I see that—”normalize inner work”—as saying, “Hey, let’s participate in that process with more volition.” It’s really just a perspective shift. It’s a decision to say, “Oh, I’m part of this. It’s not just happening.” There’s the first doorway.
It gets more interesting when we’re playing with that beyond meditation and ceremony. Like, now I’m doing the dishes, now I’m on this podcast, now I’m checking out at the grocery store. It’s just one thing. It’s always just this. So in that way, what I want to do is bring people along on my own journey—of “how aware can I be of the specialness, the sacredness of the boringness.” What if you have to accept that it’s actually okay amidst it all?
I think the more we can rest in that knowing, the more we can bring that knowing into the fore of our gaze, into our energy. That, I really feel, is more needed than anything today. 3.5% is the number of people, supposedly, if they come out to protest, it’s game over. So let’s just say, of adults, that’s about 100 million. That’s not that many people. I think we can do that. To me, that feels like the game.
Is that a cop-out? Is that spiritual bypassing? As someone who’s speaking about these things publicly, it’s like I know on the one hand, and on the other, I don’t know. I’m making it up too. And that’s why I love music, especially instrumental music—because it’s just feeling. I find myself lately leaning more into saying less. I’m just playing more and not trying to attach too much specificity to it. I’m just letting it do its thing. That’s what all art is, and it’s very important right now, both as a countercultural force and some kind of nutrient mechanism to fertilize something going on inside of us.
I like how, in a number of your songs, you sing words that aren’t words.
Technically, I guess it’d be called glossolia. Some people would even more pejoratively say it’s scat singing.
I remember I was playing a ceremony on the winter solstice in 2012. I improvise in the ceremonies, and sometimes stuff would come up where I was just kind of singing tones. Sometimes I’d notice there’s a little consonant in there or something, and I’d be like, well, why don’t I just lean into that? It was very freeing. I kept doing it, and all these years later, I don’t even think about it anymore. It’s like another instrument.
The human voice is very powerful. It’s the auditory equivalent of a window to the soul. And when I’ve been in journeys and I hear the voice, a human voice, that for me is often a clear channel to Source. I was exploring a lot of different ideas and mechanisms in the ceremony space of just what works best to guide you through a journey. And one of those aspects was to dial down the language centers so that you’re more in this open, non-dualistic space of metaphor and feeling.
It strikes me that it reproduces our original experience of the human voice in the womb, where we don’t yet know what the words mean, but we hear people talking. And there’s that sense of something beyond the veil.
I love that. Yeah, and that’s the first thing that comes online in the womb, your hearing.
It sounds like you improvise during these ceremonies, and also maybe these ceremonial concerts?
I have a spectrum. On one end would be a medicine circle, which typically is not going to be more than twenty people. They’re long form. Everyone’s on medicine, mushrooms. You’re very entwined with each person: it’s not random, you know who’s there, we’ve talked, it’s very hands-on. I one-hundred-percent improvise that. That’s probably one of the harder things I do. Then on the other end of the spectrum might be a TED thing where you’ve got one song to play, or just forty minutes, and it’s on camera. I have set lists for that.
I think it’s a very worthy endeavor to consider how to make a great show. How can you create a narrative arc? It’s hard to do. I like to have that as a framework, but keep lots of openness in there for when inspiration strikes. For example, I could have a song like “10 Laws,” which I’ve been playing for seventeen years, but constantly be challenging myself, asking, “What’s a new way to start it?” Or, “What if I threw out this baseline?” Or I will have whole sections in it where there’s new stuff, improvised stuff coming in and out. I like to have that dance.
Do you feel a tension between the performance aspect and the ceremonial aspect? I recall that at the New York show, you were playing for so many different kinds of people: the journeyers in the room, the people in the back having drinks, and so on.
It’s a challenge. We haven’t cracked the code, and I’ve done a lot of different formats. We have not found a way to do straight ceremony, so to speak; that just doesn’t work within the music industry. The promoters just freak out and run away as soon as you mention anything like sitting or lying on the floor. They’re like, “I don’t understand this, there are eight other holds who want this date, we’re out.” They care about the bar, too, which no one’s drinking much of during my shows.
So I’m doing seated shows for this upcoming tour. There’s my solution. I saw Sigur Rós at the Beacon theater in 2005. It changed my life. This was before East Forest. My friend gave me some mushrooms, I was comfortable, I sunk into the chair, and I just went into this world. And I was like, we can do that. What’s the difference between that and lying down? It’s cheaper for people to come; it’s not the price of five tickets, it’s one ticket. And promoters are like, “I can do a seated show.” So that’s what I’m experimenting with right now. I’m hoping the community comes along with me.
But we’re pushing new territory. It’s not legal to take mushrooms in a public setting. And also, ethically, I’m not the guy who’s like, “Hey, everyone take mushrooms.” That’s not my invitation. It’s sort of like any show: choose your own adventure, but remember, it’s a public space. I’m hoping we can all start to learn about personal responsibility, self-directed healing. We try to have psychedelic air marshals, in a sense, like sitters in the room. But I’m not saying, “Hey, we’ve got five sitters here, everybody trip out.”
Say there’s no financial concern. What sort of shows would you love to do?
I’d love to do a ten-night residency at Madison Square Garden, where spirituality and inner work is so normal and relevant that it’s not considered weird. It’s more just feeling deeply. It’s not only entertaining; you feel so moved and inspired that you are then propelled to take big leaps in your life.
I want to do what Sigur Rós did, I want to play at the Beacon Theater. You can do things theatrically with lights and projection in those spaces; that’s what they’re made for.
I also think a Vegas residency would be an amazing achievement because you’re reaching middle America, and you can make a show that’s repeatable. That’s a very interesting creative challenge to me. I’m trying to reach people who don’t know about this yet, and we have to do that within the theater system. That’s really the only way. Sure, you could say, for example, I only play in fields in the summer, but that’s very limited. You have to find a way that you can rinse and repeat, in a sense, within the system. This is the great experiment I’m working on.
Many psychedelic guides and therapists use playlists with music not written explicitly for journeying. What do you think about this practice? With guides, there is still improvisation; they might put on a more intense track in response to what’s happening in the room. But again, the music wasn’t written with this intention.
When people use playlists, it can function, but they’re almost always using music off-label. Meaning, it wasn’t designed for the purpose of guiding a psychedelic journey. That’s not inherently pejorative to say that. I just mean to say, what could work potentially more effectively? Clearly, if the music was designed for that purpose, it’s probably going to have things imbued into it that make it more effectual. The gold standard would be live music in the room. And the gold standard above that would be live and improvised. Then they’re truly bringing forth sound and song in a relationship, human to human.
I wish there were more music that was specifically designed for that space, but it is not economically supported. The world’s asking for more short-form content. On top of that, most artists say, “I have no agenda; interpret my work as you will.” I mean, it’s not cool to say, “No, I do, and this is what it’s for.” So a lot of people don’t want to go there.
I do think that playlists are inherently inferior. People get angry when I say that. But most people haven’t tried the next step, which is one artistic voice taking you through the whole experience, with music written and intended for that.
Most people also have not experienced one artistic voice taking you through that live. But that’s how it was, forever. So there also might be sort of an epigenetic familiarity. Medicine songs have been part of culture across the board. They are a technology. Ayahuascaros have said that the songs call forth the spirit of ayahuasca. Without the songs, there is no ceremony. That’s a big statement. So I welcome a creative explosion in the modern space, with all these amazing tools we have for the distribution of music and creation.
What are you thinking about, in technical terms, when you are writing and improvising music for journeys?
I’m playing with tension and release. The entire arc of the experience is hopefully responding to what I’m feeling in the room. I’m playing with harmony and relationships, amidst that time, to create an arc. I’m bringing my theater background too, and also, before East Forest, my experience playing in bands. I used to write a lot of singer-songwriter stuff. I learned about hooks and pop music. You can hear that in the music. I want it to be experimental, but I also want it to be grounded in certain techniques that you’re familiar with, because I like them. There are hooks in the songs. And those are themes, those are leitmotifs that come and go. And that gives you something to flow with. Sometimes it feels traditional, like this is a chorus, and it just came back. But sometimes I subvert that idea, and it goes away, or it’s reversed. I love the freedom in the psychedelic space. What matters is that it’s coming from the heart, but I’m also trying to take it into a space, musically, that feels on the edge of virgin territory for me, something a bit new and innovative.
This is a very particular musical frontier. Jon Hopkins, whom you’ve collaborated with, is another artist exploring this edge. Are there others?
Justin Boreta with Superposition. I think some of Snow Raven’s work is designed for that. Porangui. There are probably many others I don’t know about. And then I talk to a lot of artists, bigger artists, who express a desire to do stuff like this. I always try to encourage them. Reggie Watts and I once talked about collaborating. And there are others that you’d probably be somewhat surprised to hear. So I think we’re on the verge of something, but we could use more.
Tell us about your upcoming tour.
I’m heading on the road soon to do these live events that I feel are very important. It’s not just like, “let’s go to a cool show. I hope it is that for you.” But I think it can be a really powerful medicine to not only be with other people and feeling these deep feelings, but to feel the motivation and support to help you step forward with more bravery and grace amidst everything. It’s going to get crazier out there in the world. We have not reached rock bottom, believe it or not. There’s more to come. And we need people who are clear-eyed and open-hearted—in a grounded way, in a normal way. So this is for everybody. This isn’t about a certain tribe, or a specific look, or a race, or a color. I mean, everybody.
Music for Mushrooms is available for widespread streaming at musicformushrooms.com. Tickets for East Forest’s upcoming tour are available at EastForest.org.
Featured image: Opening Ceremony w/ East Forest 2019 by Matthew Wordell.